North Yorkshire in Verse - Moor to Shore in Poetry

 

North Yorkshire is England's largest county, and its most various. Moor to Shore in Poetry moves across the whole of it — from the heather-dark tops of the North York Moors to the salt-scoured harbours of the coast, from market towns to the deep quiet of the dales. This is the first volume in the British Counties in Verse series, and it sets the method for everything that follows: attention paid to a real place, without the postcard.

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The poems here do not reach for easy beauty. They start from the ground — the rock, the ore, the tide, the weather that never quite stops reshaping the land and the lives built on it. A ruined abbey is read as stone above sea. A dale is read as the long negotiation between people and a landscape that outlasts them. What emerges is a county held to close attention: precise, unsentimental, and all the more moving for it.

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What's inside the collection

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Moor to Shore travels the county the way a walker would — by ground covered and weather met. Whitby's cliffs and the 199 steps. The wind off the moor tops. The curlew's call over open country. The stone villages that have kept their footing for centuries. Each poem stands in a named, specific place and listens: to its geology, its history, its ordinary present-day life. Together they form a map of North Yorkshire drawn in verse rather than ink.

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Who it's for

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This is a book for anyone who loves the landscape of North Yorkshire — whether you walk the dales each week, grew up here and moved away, or carry the county in your family's memory from further afield. Readers in the UK, the United States and Canada have found their way to the series, and to this first volume in particular. If you value landscape writing, regional history, or poetry that connects deeply with place, Moor to Shore was written with you in mind. It makes a considered gift for the walker, the traveller, or the reader with Yorkshire roots.

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A sample from the collection

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Come wander where the dales unfold,

Through heathered paths and sheepfolds bold—

The air is pure, the skies stretch wide,

In moors that hold both peace and pride

 

From Whitby’s cliffs to York’s stone gate,

Each town a tale, each street innate—

Tea rooms hum, the abbeys gleam,

And markets bustle like a dream